Postdoctoral Seed Program Information

Review and Award Procedure

Initial Screening:

The proposals were initially reviewed internally by two non-conflicted reviewers using criteria that included: adherence to guidelines in the call for proposals; sufficient detail addressing the criteria in the solicitation; suitability of the proposed research to be carried out by a postdoctoral associate.

Of the initial 43 proposals, 27 were selected for full review while the remaining 16 proposals were not reviewed further. The 16 proposals that were not sent for a full review were classified as Category 3. While the quality of proposals in this group was almost uniformly high, they did not rise to the same level as the proposals that were sent for full review. Comments of the reviewers will be provided upon request.

Full Review:

The 27 proposals selected for a full review were sent to three internal reviewers and one external reviewer who conducted independent reviews. The internal reviewers are TT faculty with strong research records. The external reviewer is an academic research scientist also with a strong research record.

Care was taken to ensure that the reviewers were free of conflict. Of the 100+ proposal reviews conducted, there were two identified conflicts and the reviewers recused themselves from these two reviews.

The reviewers individually ranked the proposals based on the criteria that were described in the solicitation:

1. Technical Merit

2. Likelihood of rapidly generating external funding

3. Funding track record of PI/co-PIs

4. Other support

Based on these criteria, each reviewer independently assigned a unique ranking for each proposal, which was converted to ranking points - 27 points for the highest ranked proposal, 1 for the lowest ranked proposal. (Highest possible points = 108; Lowest possible points = 4)

Total ranking points for each proposal were tabulated by summing across all four reviewers. Based on these point totals, the top nine proposals were designated Category 1: Fund Immediately. The remaining 18 proposals were designated Category 2: Fund if more funding becomes available.

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